Nearly 200 years of history of Catholicism in Southwest Washington and the Pacific Northwest was on display Sunday for parishioners and visitors to downtown Vancouver’s Proto-Cathedral of St. James the Greater.
The Catholic Church’s local history is intertwined with Euro-American settlement of the Pacific Northwest. It dates as far back as the Hudson’s Bay Co.’s fur-trading post at Fort Vancouver, established in the winter of 1824-25. Though the enterprise was British, many of the fur trappers who traded at the fort were French-Canadians. They began writing to Montreal to ask for priests, and in 1838 the first two arrived and celebrated a Mass at the fort.
By 1846, a first St. James church was established outside the fur-trading post’s walls, near what today is East Reserve and Fifth streets, said Paul Deming, a St. James parishioner and amateur church historian.
“I think it’s good catechesis for our parish to remember our history,” Deming said. The parish retains a remarkable collection, some of it regularly on display, but many other items normally relegated to long-term storage.
On Sunday, some of those earliest relics of the local church were on display, along with the stories behind them. The items were as magnificent as the proto-cathedral itself, which was completed in 1885 — four years before statehood. Some were as small as a silver chalice used by Father A.M.A. Blanchet, the first bishop of the now-defunct Diocese of Walla Walla and of the Diocese of Nesqually. It was the latter diocese that made its home at St. James in Vancouver before later becoming the Archdiocese of Seattle.
There was an original window and the altar from the first St. James, which burned in 1889, likely as the result of arson. There were old Bibles and liturgical texts, and photographs of Vancouver long before the Interstate 5 Bridge was built. And of course there were many examples of the pioneering hand of Mother Joseph, a woman so remarkable that her image is one of two Washingtonians on display in the National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol. It was Mother Joseph who founded the region’s first hospital, operated an orphanage, designed and built The Academy, and operated a school. She even was an artist — a wax doll of the infant Jesus that she made was part of the collection displayed Sunday.
“It’s remarkable for a building of this vintage that we have all of this original stuff,” Deming said. The downside, of course, is that there are a lot of items to conserve and catalog. He hopes that someday the history of the proto-cathedral and the people who pioneered the area will be available to the public on a regular basis.
